Last week's urban riots asked serious questions of the government's policies towards police reform. The cornerstone of the government's reforms – passing responsibility for local policing to directly elected police and crime commissioners (PCCs) – is looking increasingly misguided.

The idea of PCCs is directly inspired by US practice, even though in the wider context the US and the UK are very different. The claim is that PCCs will deliver more for less and ensure greater local police accountability. This change implies setting in stone the existing 43-force structure, thus closing off the more obvious route to greater police efficiency and effectiveness. It also means abolishing the existing local council-based police authorities. Support has been muted everywhere with widespread concern that the introduction of PCCs will lead to the greater politicisation of policing. Those directly involved, principally local authorities and the police themselves, are vociferously opposed, as is the Labour opposition.

One point of principal, and it is almost a constitutional issue, relates to the operational independence of chief constables. The government is proposing an agreed protocol, which the House of Lords, in an amendment to the police and social responsibility bill, is insisting should be statutory. Statutory or not, framing and agreeing the protocol is proving very difficult.

The basic idea, that no one should be able to influence the police over a particular case, is not in dispute. However if, as the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers said in the aftermath of the riots, no one, not even the Home Secretary, has the power to order a pencil let alone the cancellation of police leave, it is difficult to see how the PCC can be an effective agent for improving police efficiency. Policing can never be wholly divorced from politics but recent events have shown, particularly in the relationship between the mayor of London and the Met (read, potentially, PCCs), how easily a situation can develop into a toxic mix of party politics and public scapegoating.

The potential for conflict between the 43 PCCs and the 380-odd local authorities is huge. Local authorities argue, not unreasonably, that they are responsible to their electorate for all local services including policing, particularly as they raise local taxes. It will not be long, as again the riots of last week illustrate, before a blame game ensues between the PCCs and the local council as to whose policies and programmes are at fault and who is responsible.

What is also clear is that the PCCs will be unable to deliver "what is on the tin" – effective police accountability to local communities. Even the smallest force areas are far too large (PCCs of one of the larger forces will have an electorate around 20 times bigger than the average constituency MP) to enable a PCC to forge an effective relationship with individual communities. It is also inevitable that PCC elections will be dominated by the national political parties, which alone have the organisation and funds to fight a campaign across a large geographical area. The PCCs will predominantly be professional party politicians in hock to the party machines. Is that the intention?

A key part of the government's original plan for police reform distinguished between the national and the local through setting up a National Crime Agency. The NCA would lead on tackling serious and organised crime. Crucially it was to possess operational capabilities, with the implication that it would be given powers over the 43 local forces. It now appears that the NCA is simply going to be a marginally beefed up version of the existing Serious Organised Crimes Agency i.e. concerned mainly with intelligence. The bill does impose on PCCs and chief constables a statutory duty to collaborate with the NCA and with each other, but experience shows that this just doesn't work. Nationally at an operational level someone has to be in charge. It now looks as though governance of policing is going to be just as confusing as it has been under the existing tripartite system, except that PCCs are likely to be more malleable by Westminster than the local council-dominated police authorities ever were. This looks like a centralising not a de-centralising measure.

The police and social responsibility bill is set to receive royal assent in the autumn. Is it conceivable that the recent examples of how destabilising it can be when police and politician's roles get too close, and the likely fall-out from numerous unintended consequences, could cause the government to think again?

Robert McFarland has been involved in government reviews in the areas of criminal justice and forensic science

This article is published by Guardian Professional. Join the Guardian Public Leaders Network to receive regular emails on the issues at the top of the professional agenda